![](https://design.christiancook.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/08/cow-02.jpg)
Sitting around an IKEA table and sipping lattes with a group of marketing executives and chatting about ‘incentivising this’ or ‘surfacing that’, it becomes quite a mental task to reconcile the fact that this whole concept of ‘branding’ takes its name from using hot metal to scar a cow’s bum. But many of the mistakes that companies make in attempting